Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” He hosts Michael Harris Live, an Ottawa talk show on CFRA. His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies.

Judging from the reaction to the sex-abuse scandal that is rocking Penn State University, sexual assault victims are as invisible as ever – especially when they happen to be disadvantaged children.

Like a lot of child sex-abuse scandals, this one operated on a delayed fuse. Ten years ago, a graduate assistant, Mike McQuery, said he saw John Sandusky, the idolized assistant coach of the Penn State football team, sodomizing a young boy in the team showers.

McQuery, who later became a coach himself, passed the information along to Coach Joe Paterno, who in turn told Penn State’s athletic director Tim Curly. Curly sent the report up the line through the vice-president for finance and business all the way to the president’s office. Like an ice-cube watering down a drink as it melts, the message was diluted the higher it went – or so we are led to believe. In the end, McQuery’s child-rape became “some sort of sexual encounter.”

Note that none of the normal things were done. Most people who walked in on what they took to be a child-rape would not hurry away to make a report. Had the victim been the child or grand-child of another coach, I doubt that the reaction would have been as bureaucratic. Had the perpetrator been a janitor, the chance encounter in the locker-room would probably have ended in broken bones. No one who learned of the reported sodomy called the police – no one, including the eyewitness Mike McQuery. Last but not least, there is no record that anyone at Penn State contacted the young boy to see if he needed help, medical or otherwise.

But that is not to say Sandusky went unpunished: the Athletic Director and the Vice-President for finance and business took away Sandusky’s keys to the locker-room. They also forbade him from bringing children on campus. They didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that if Sandusky were a pedophile, he would simply take his victims elsewhere. Something other than the protection of a child was operating here in the minds of the people who stumbled on this apparent outrage; the reputation of a great university and the good name of a handful of legendary coaches who ran Penn State’s multi-million dollar football program.

For nearly 10 more years, things went on as usual in Happy Valley – the team won games, the football program put 100,000 fans in the stands for every kickoff, and the endowments kept pouring in. Then in early November the roof caved in. Sandusky was arrested for molesting young boys who went through The Second Mile, a charity he had set up for “boys at risk.” A Grand Jury report said that two of the alleged assaults by Sandusky took place on the campus of Penn State.

With the story out, Penn State moved with alacrity. Coach Paterno was fired along with the institution’s president Graham Spanier. As for Mike McQuery, he is on leave under police protection. The Board of Trustees is clearly aware that the University’s liability in this case could be huge, and it doesn’t want Penn State to be seen to be sitting on its hands – again.

The initial reaction to “Joe Pa’s” firing was as damning as the university’s original handling of the scandal. Some students turned over cars, snapped pictures with their cell-phones and uploaded the images of their rage to Facebook. What were they angry about? Not the child victims, but the sacking of their iconic football coach. Even Bobby Bowden, a fellow coach and lifelong friend of Paterno, reduced the seriousness of what had happened to a melancholy misdemeanor. “It’s sad what happened at Penn State. Joe was a little negligent.”

Many people who have followed this story are bewildered that it ever could have happened in the first place. I am not one of them. If you substitute Mount Cashel for Penn State, and various members of the once revered Irish Christian Brothers with the university’s still adored football coaches, this is pure déjà vu. Consider the eerie similarities.

The horror of Mount Cashel was not only the hideous sexual and physical abuse the boys were subjected to by a religious order of the Catholic Church, it is the fact that the authorities of the day knew all about it.

The list of individuals, agencies and departments that knew what was happening at the orphanage was long and depressing – the department of Social Services, the department of Justice, the Archdiocese of St. John’s, and the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC). A police investigation into alleged sexual assaults against children as young as five ended with written confessions signed by two of the worst pedophiles at Mount Cashel. What happened next in the institutional shadows had nothing to do with justice.

The investigating officers were ordered by their Chief to remove all references to sexual offences from their damning report. They were ordered not to interview the other 68 boys at Mount Cashel. In the end, Newfoundland’s deputy-minister of justice worked out a deal with representatives of the Order whose members had already confessed to sex crimes against the children in their care. There were to be no criminal charges; instead, Brothers Edward English and Alan Ralph were sent out of the province to Mono Mills Ontario for treatment at a church-run facility.

Ironically, their victims were never offered treatment. Here’s how the Superior General of the Christian Brothers Worldwide explained that heartless omission: “I sincerely was not aware of the terrible impact this kind of abuse has on the victims. Lacking the knowledge of the harm and damage that can be done to individuals as a result of this behavior, the best procedure was thought to be to try and rehabilitate the perpetrators…” The best procedure, that is, was for the whole thing to be swept under the rug.

The Irish Christian Brothers and the Catholic Church got an unholy deal with the justice department because of a long and illustrious history in Newfoundland as spiritual leaders and teachers. The child victims of the orphanage were sacrificed to keep that reputation intact. At Penn State, men who looked the other way when they were told that a child had been sodomized in the football team’s locker-room by a celebrated associate, did so to protect the lustre of Penn State’s reputation and the glory and cash surrounding their college football program. Again, a child was sacrificed to save the image of an institution deemed too important to be held to account in the usual way – in court.

Inevitably, most cover-ups fail. When they do, the results are disastrous. When the true story of Mount Cashel saw the light of day, a number of Christian Brothers went to jail, the Order paid $13-million in compensation to the victims, the government changed its child welfare rules and the orphanage itself was razed to the ground. The Church in Newfoundland has never quite been the same.

For the record, Terry Sandusky denies the charges, while admitting he shouldn’t have taken showers with young boys or “horsed around” with them as much as he did. On the other side of the ledger, ten more kids have come forward to say the former coach molested them.

Depending on how Terry Sandusky’s months in court go, Penn State could learn the hard lessons absorbed by the Catholic Church. You can rest assured the civil lawsuits will come. But payouts to victims and lost endowments could be the least of the university’s problems. The former university president could find himself facing charges, as could Mike McQuery, Joe Paterno, and all the other officials of the athletic department who failed to contact the police over what McQuery says he saw in the showers that day.

While Paterno supporters and members of the sports fraternity downplay that possibility, the university would be wise to pay attention to a recent court case in Missouri. For the first time in the 25 year history of the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse fiasco, an American bishop was indicted last month by a grand jury for failure to report suspected child abuse. He knew that one of his priests was taking lewd pictures of young girls, some of them at an Easter Egg hunt, but took five months to hand them over to police. In the meantime, Rev. Shawn Ratigan’s shutter kept busy.

And that of course is the point. If Penn State had taken action in the Sandusky Affair back in 2002, there may have been a lot fewer children popping up to tell us that they are not invisible.